Can you tell us what the song Now I Am An Arsonist is about? It's not as obvious as the title might suggest. It talks about astronauts and acrobats while arson is hardly mentioned. Did you have the backstory of some particular arsonist, real or imagined, in mind when you wrote it?

wbr1 writes: It seems abundantly clear now that Dice and the SlashBeta designers do not care one whit about the community here. They do not care about rolling in crapware into sourceforge installers. In short, the only thing that talks to them is money and stupid ideas.

Granted, it takes cash to run sites like these, but they were fine before. The question is, do some of you here want to band together, get whatever is available of slashcode and rebuild this community somewhere else? We can try to make it as it once was, a haven of geeky knowledge and frosty piss, delivered free of charge in a clean community moderated format.

An anonymous reader writes: Like many Slashdotters, I intend to stop visiting Slashdot after the beta changeover. After years of steady decline in the quality of discussions here, the beta will be the last straw. What sites alternative to Slashdot have others found? The best I have found has been arstechnica.com, but it has been a while since I've looked for tech discussion sites.

mugnyte writes: With Slashdot's recent restyled "BETA" slowly rolled to most users, there's been a lot of griping about the changes. This is nothing new, as past style changes have had similar effects. However, this pass there are significant usability changes: A narrower read pane, limited moderation filtering, and several color/size/font adjustments. BETA implies not yet complete, so taking that cue — please list your specific, detailed opinoins, one per comment, and let's use the best part of slashdot (the moderation system) to raise the attention to these. Change can be jarring, but let's focus on the true usability differences with the new style.Link to Original Source

kelk1 writes: As a poor submitter found out (https://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/02/05/2328224/html5-app-for-panasonic-tvs-rejected---jquery-is-a-hack), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org) suddenly forced a preview of its beta site without any warning on all its viewers.

Judging by the comments, the feedback was immediate and clearly negative.

I cannot speak for the forum moderation side, but my reaction to the front page was an knee jerk: "Oh no!, not another portal full of noise I cannot speed-read through." Text and hyperlinks are what we need, please, and as little graphics as possible. Think lynx, thank you.

Taco Cowboy writes: Before I register my account with/. I frequented it for almost 3 weeks. If I were to register the first time I visited/. my account number would be in the triple digits.

That said, I want to ask Dice why they are so eager to kill off Slashdot.

Is there a secret buyer somewhere waiting to grab this domain, Dice ? Just tell us. There are those amongst us who can afford to pay for the domain. What we want is to have a Slashdot that we know, that we can use, that we can continue to share information with all others.

somenickname writes: As a long time Slashdot reader, I'm wondering what website to transition to once the beta goes live. The new beta interface seems very well suited to tablets/phones but, it ignores the fact that the user base is, as one would expect, nerds sitting in front of very large LCD monitors and wasting their employers time. It's entirely possible that the browser ID information gathered by the site has indicated that they get far more hits on mobile devices where the new interface is reasonable but, I feel that no one has analyzed the browser ID (and screen resolution) against comments modded +5. I think you will find that most +5 comments are coming from devices (real fucking computers) that the new interface does not support well. Without an interface that invites the kind of users that post +5 comments, Slashdot is just a ho-hum news aggregation site that allows comments. So, my question is, once the beta is the default, where should Slashdot users go to?

That was a decade-long fight inside id, really, about how open we should be with the technology and with the modifiability. The two things people were concerned about were, as you say: won’t people be able to make levels and sell them in competition to us? And there were certainly some specific cases, like the whole D-Zone game that came out with the package of a million or whatever different levels somebody could find scraped off the BBSes and put out there. We know some of those things sold really large numbers. So there was definitely an element of bitterness inside some corners of the company about that. I don’t think that they ever took anything from us; it’s not like we had a competing package.

But then the other side of it was the technological evolution question, where people said, aren’t we giving away some of our secrets? When we released our source code to the builder and those different aspects. And certainly tons of people learned from that, and did go on to build things, and you know, there’s an argument to be made that the company could have perhaps held onto a lead and an edge in the market better without doing that. But I think we came out net positive.

I was really happy a decade later when Kevin Cloud, one of my partners, said that I had been right to be pushing for doing that. Because he had been looking at it not so much from the community and technological openness standpoint, but as a business risk. Coolly looked back at over the years, I think we benefited more than it might have hurt us. But in truth, I was just doing that at the time because it was something that felt really right to me.

I still remember, at the time I was commenting about how I remembered being a teenager sector-editing Ultima II on my Apple II, to go ahead and hack things in to turn trees into chests or modify my gold or whatever, and I loved that. The ability to go several steps further and release actual source code, make it easy to modify things, to let future generations get what I wished I had had a decade earlier—I think that’s been a really good thing.